Explication of Annabel Lee
Explication of Annabel Lee In a healthy relationship it is a good idea to set boundaries to not encroach on each other’s space. In Annabel Lee Edgar Allen Poe dismisses the concept of boundaries and a unanimous self-diluted speaker theorizes how his and Annabel’s love was so intense that the angels were jealous and sent a wind that killed Annabel. Poe gives the audience a glimpse of the mind of a maniacal stalker who is so obsessed that he resorts to lying down beside his dead maiden as he himself wishes to die so he can one day rejoin her in the afterlife. The purpose of the first stanza is to paint a picture of scene where the poem is taking place. It starts off like a fairy tale, telling the audience that the story we are about to hear occurred “many a year ago” in a “kingdom by the sea” (Poe1-2). Poe uses repetition to remind his audience of the location in the second line of every stanza because these minute details are significant because the sea and the kingdom are the major images of the poem and it creates a sort of hypnotizing effect on the reader, which Poe is synonymous for. In the next two lines he introduces the main character by the name of Annabel Lee. He calls her a maiden, inferring that she is fairly young and presumably attractive, and it also keeps with the general tone of the poem. In the next two lines Poe reveals his purpose for writing the poem, which is that him and Annabel Lee were deeply and passionately in love, so much so that all they could think about day to day was each other. In the second stanza, Poe gives a time frame in which the poem took place. In the first line of the second stanza Poe lets his audience knows that he and Annabel Lee were in fact children: “I was a child and she was a child”, when their love first staked its claim. This line also lets his readers know how unusual their relationship was, but at the same time it seems unstable because their love took hold at such a young age as indicated by the last two